Traveling at Home

Bishop's poem "Questions of Travel" is aptly titled, since it does not give any answers. Yet, the trajectory of the poem begins with apprehensiveness towards various geographic features of the earth, and after the poem begs the reader to consider the reasoning behind seeking different parts of the world and lays out a list of things that would be "a pity" (lines 30, 42, 47) to miss, the poem seems to veer on the side of celebrating the human need to satisfy wanderlust, - the desire to travel. Still, only rhetorical questions are provided to illustrate the poem's perspective, and the value of staying at home and imagining experiences may be equal to that of physically having those experiences.
     If you have ever had a conversation with me about exploring the Adirondacks or traveling, it is likely that you have heard me expressed my guilt over having wanderlust. I have always judged the need to travel to be a sign of weakness in a person, an attitude that probably developed from engaging my imagination muscle through reading books, writing, and creating scenarios for stuffed animals and dolls as a child. There is this sense of superiority I feel when I am able to stay in my room all afternoon and come to the dinner table with a changed perspective and memories of near-sensory experiences (thoughts?) just from exercising my mind. I have asked myself time and time again "must we dream our dreams and have them, too?", except in my own words. And as I temporarily dwell in this new place filled with mountains I have not climbed, animals I have not heard call, a view of the stars I have barely gazed at, firs I have not smelled, and fresh air I have not tasted, my faith in the infinite power of the human imagination is constantly challenged. Just as there are colors and vibrational frequencies unbeknownst to our reality, just as every form of artistic media--including these words-- has its limitations, our imagination is not everything. There would be no books if there were not inspiration, and the only inspiration that I know of stems from the world around us. Even our dreams reflect all we have perceived from our exterior in this life. So, I am not so ashamed to want to travel anymore.
     But still, I do not know where my home is. "Continent, city, country, society"-- They are all so similar. If home is everywhere, am I never home, or am I always home? If my imagination is strong enough to give me all that I need and desire, and I could get along just staying at home, if home can be "wherever that may be", does staying at home mean that I actually do not stay in one place? Perhaps the earth, the universe, even,  is smaller than I have been interpreting it to be. Perhaps I am always staying in my room, and my imagination is no less weak.

Insider/Outsider Narratives

While Bill Bryson is explicit of his role as an outsider entering the trail - his inexperience and distance often serving as a subject for humor - his position carries with it an indifference and lack of sympathy. His anti-romanticism and cynicism, though self-directed and widespread, seems at times unnecessarily harsh. With the subtitle “Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trial,” the reader might expect the locals of Appalachia to not so simply be reduced to caricatures, as Bryson often does.  In describing the dangers that he might encounter on the trail ahead, Bryson follows a list of dangerous animals with “loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex.” While admittedly this line made me chuckle upon my first reading, Bryson’s stereotyping of rural culture is left unaccompanied by a genuine analysis or comment.

Is it impossible, I wonder, for an outsider to truly capture the narrative of the insider? Bryson, of course, hardly attempts – capturing the voice of the Appalachian local is not his objective.

Conversely, the photographs of Shelby Lee Adams provide an intimate insider view into the lives of Appalachian locals. Having been raised in rural Kentucky, Adams notes that: “I think of my work as an insider’s view…When your blood’s connected, and you’re born and raised in a place, you’re always connected.” His work portrays a culture of people who are rarely seen but frequently portrayed in popular representations through hyperbolic stereotypes. Adam’s work provides a direct glimpse into the ordinary aspects of their lives that Bryson, as an outsider, not only ignores, but instead actively speaks over. 

In our Common Experience Seminar, the narrative of those living in areas of the Adirondacks with high rates of illiteracy and poverty have gone largely unheard. The fractal peripheries of the Adirondacks are such that the insiders of this place are often simultaneously outsiders – the owners of Great Camps and luxurious summer homes have access to a different Adirondacks than the farmers and hermits do. Nearing the end of our time here, I see this place through a liminal lens - as much as I might take advantage of the local discount, there are a myriad of Adirondack aspects I can still only understand from afar.

Some of Adams' Photographs:

Elizabeth Bishop and interconnectivity, and confinement.

The Mountain confronts nature with the language of loss.  It's striking because the diction conveys destruction amidst the unnamed something that remains constant and unchanged.  For example, words like "burn" (l.3), "sifted" (l. 26), and "clambering" (l. 19) speak to the active dissolution of things.  At the same time, words like "hardening" (l. ), "hang" (l. ), and the lines, "Shadows fall down/lights climb" (l. ) speak a certain perpetuity and permanence of the unnamed thing(s).

Mostly, the confinement comes from unrealized starts and questions that Bishop, for example, "start for a second" (l.2) only to "halt" (l.3).  This is mirrored in the repetition of "Tell me how old I am", the unanswered request for confirmation.  Without it, the speaker is confined to half starts and inbetweens.

I liked to think about this poem's interconnectivity in relation to its confining language.  Alexa mentioned the belief that all beings and matter of the earth is one, or nondual.  This presents the world many identities operating fluidly as one.  But, what if Bishop is asking if there is only one identity operating as many things, and, for some reason, is confined by the unbroken permanence of this identity?  Maybe as the speaker is confined without reprieve, so too are the nature elements that Bishop writes.  For example, light, hardened wings, unwiped waterfalls remain as does the speaker's question for self-awareness.  Bishop does not write these elements of nature as confined by unanswered questions, but perhaps the question pertains to them as it does the speaker.

This poem is tricky, I love it, I will keep reading it.  It's hard to write in the uncharted terms of the religious/philosophical idea of nondual.  Additionally, nondual in the context of religion represents freedom, or furthermore, peace.  However, Bishop's poem takes the identity piece and flips it, though I don't exactly know for what purpose.

Expert Amateur

Bill Bryson's book offered a refreshing, new perspective to our class. As Onno said, Bryson really commits to being an expert amateur, which I feel shows in the content of his writing. Bryson constantly emphasizes his outsider mentality and his inability to do certain things the way people who were more qualified would. The combination of self-deprecating honesty and more than generous amounts of exaggeration create a comical tone for the novel.

This is the type of book I wanted to keep reading and reading; this may be a result of humour but I am not sure why else. Onno questioned our class if Bryson's book was the kind of book that inspired you to go hike the AT. I immediately thought, "No way." Then wondered why I found this book interesting. It didn't inspire me to do anything, it almost sells itself as a book about hiking the entirety of the AT trail but isn't a book about that, and it's pretty long and detailed.

I wonder if it was because of how common Bryson made himself seem. He successfully pulled this off by using the second person in relatable instances. This allowed the reader to become apart of the experience rather than an observer of the experience. Was that why the book interested me? I felt like it was a journey I was also embarking and I needed to know how it'd end? I am still unsure of Bryson's purpose. What was his intended goal? Who is his target audience?

One thing I really enjoyed about this book was when Bryson would go into serious scientific detail about the nature or culture around him. One part that really stuck out to me was when Bryson mentioned the Jack-O-Lantern mushroom that received that name because it glowed at night. This image was beautiful to me, the fact that that mushroom exists is amazing, and it also reminded me of the one of the beginning chapters in Ed Kanze's book that we read this summer. When Kanze goes under his house he finds a glowing moss commonly referred to as "Goblin's gold." When I read that part of the book I thought that was incredible; that was the strongest, most intereseting aspect of the book for me. It was interesting to have a similar experience like that in Bryson's book.

The Personal Challenge

I found the most interesting part of A Walk in the Woods to be how inspiring it is. I don't know what makes the book make me so interested in completing a big grand gesture, especially since he himself does not and is none to favorable in his account of the experience. Maybe part of the draw is being able to humbly brag about your accomplishment at dinner parties and on first dates, so the others around you know that you are someone Who Has Done Something. But, nonetheless, a third of the way through the book, there I was with an urge to just take the time to complete some personal challenge. My personal challenge would not be to walk that far, or even a third of that distance, but to complete a long reading challenge.

There are a few I could choose from. The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge, which consists of reading the more than 300 novels that appear in Gilmore Girls, or a Goodreads challenge length of my own choosing (probably around 200 books for the year), or I could do Bustle's year of reading only women, or read Penguin Random House's 80 Little Black Classics. There are quite a few challenges to choose from and each introduces you to many novels you might not otherwise prioritize. And I think that being able to say that I had accomplished something like this, like reading that whole Rory Gilmore list, would be an interesting experiment and would force me to read some of those influential classics I could otherwise continue to ignore in my pursuit of other, usually newer, reads.

Additionally, there are reading marathons, held in different cities around the world, reading different books at different times, that would be another challenge. New York City holds a marathon read of Steins' Making of America, Dublin hosts Bloomsday, at which Ulysses is marathon read. These never ending readathons would be another interesting challenge - say attending 4 in a year. Or another challenge could be to visit the real life places in or that inspired the settings and events of something like you 50 favorite novels. One could read all the books long-listed for a certain award. There are a lot of options.

Logistics of Thru-Hiking

Bill Bryson talked a lot about what he and Katz went through while actually hiking on the Appalachian Trail—the long days, the harsh conditions, the monotony, and the occasional beautiful view that makes everything seem a little bit okay—but he doesn’t talk about the specifics that make thru-hiking a long trail so different from a regular backpacking trip. Thru-hikers need to plan for months in advance for the kinds of food they want, mailing packages to themselves, or hitchhiking rides into small towns and figuring out ways to buy a week’s worth of non-perishable foods from a gas station that will miraculously fit into an unyielding 10 liter bear canister. This is without thinking about gear: the narrator does have a very amusing section about his experiences at a gear store purchasing everything he needed for the Appalachian Trail, but I didn’t think that it did justice to the immense amount of thought and planning that goes into carrying everything you need to survive in harsh conditions for 40 weeks in a single backpack, carrying all of the essentials and not an ounce more. As much as he described in detail the experience of taking physical steps on the trail, thru-hiking is so, so much more than that.

A Walk in the Woods and Wild are both very successful, popular books about hiking long trails in the United States that have recently been made into films. These stories are inspiring tales of people stepping out of their comfort zone to try something new, adventurous, exciting, and possibly dangerous. There are a lot of readers that decided to hike one of these trails in response to reading or watching these stories: when Wild was published in 2012, the number of PCT permits issued spiked from 300 to 2,400. It is impossible to know how many of these hopeful hikers actually reach the northern end of the trail, or how many of those did not skip sections, but the Pacific Crest Trail Association estimates that most of the new hikers are not doing it in a way that will get them to the end. There are reports of new hikers carrying laundry detergent and blow dryers on their 2,600 mile hike from Mexico to Canada. Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, even started a campaign with the PCTA called “Reasonably Wild” to encourage people inspired by her book to hike the trail only if they are truly prepared.

I really enjoyed A Walk in the Woods because of Bryson’s brutal honesty in he and Katz’s successes and failures in attempting an AT hike. They were unprepared and had hiccups, and that was completely admitted in the novel, and it ultimately didn’t matter because they had an adventure and had fun along the way. The logistics were not described in a lot of detail, but I don’t think that was the point.

I've Got the Beetz

In her poem, The Moose, Elizabeth Bishop captures the experience of travel beautifully. She colors the piece with fragments of conversations, the grandparents discussing "what he said, what she said", and the changing landscapes through the sensory observations of a passenger. Details range from "the smell of salt hay" to the "rows of sugar maples" and "clapboard farmhouses" (169). What I find most interesting is that not only can the sights and sounds change, but a bus or train has the potential to open its doors to a place vastly different from one stop to the next. Not just visibly or geographically, but culturally.

Over fall break a few weeks ago, I took a few trains to visit my mother in Pennsylvania. What should have been 3 trains turned into four, however, when I accidentally took an Express train that skipped the Haverford stop that I was intending to get off at. I realized I couldn’t do anything about it, so I got off at the final stop and would surrendered to taking a train back in the direction I had come from. At this point I was feeling pretty dumb. Suddenly, buckets of rain began to fall from the sky just as I was getting off the train to walk over to the other track.

The train I was now going to take back was scheduled to arrive at 7:04, so when one pulled in at 7:05, I started to make my way to the closest car. I was stopped however by an Amtrak worker whom I had spoken with earlier, telling me that this wasn’t the train I wanted in order to get back to Haverford. (I had asked him if I could buy a ticket on the train because, obviously, the ticket window was closed). And then there was a moose on the track! Just kidding, there wasn’t. But I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.  

I waited about ten more minutes until another train came along. This time, I confirmed with the woman next to me that this was not in fact the Polar Express and that I was getting on the right train. She assured me that it was, so I got on the train and took a seat. Soon the ticket collector came to my aisle. I told him that my destination was Haverford; he asked me for the $4.00 fare. I found $3.05 in my pocket and proceeded to rummage through my pockets/bags looking for the rest, thinking I must have one more measly dollar floating around somewhere. I couldn’t find it. What I did have, were beets. I had taken a few of the squishier ones from the Mountain House so that they wouldn’t go to waste, and in this moment I had more root vegetables on me than cash. Excuse me, kind sir, I do not have the remaining 95 cents, but would you like a nice, soft beet? No Amelia, you are no longer in the Adirondacks, you can’t just barter vegetables for train fare. Luckily, it didn’t come to that; the man took pity on me and left me and my bag of beets.

It struck me how in just a few train rides I had gone from a place where it would not have been strange to be not only carrying vegetables, but substituting them for currency, to a place where I was simply a confused, inept, waterlogged member of society. I wonder how greatly the stops in Bishop’s poem differed. Would the passenger with the two market bags going to Boston have had anything to say to the woman shaking her tablecloth seen outside the window? Would they have bartered their items?

photo: http://theverybesttop10.com/angry-wet-cats/